Thursday, 2 February 2012

I've never quite pinned down why this happens, but on occasion, when trying to adjust the workplane of a selection of beams, the dialogue greys out

As I see it, there are three different workarounds

Cut & Paste by 'Selected Level'

Select Individually

Hitch a Ride in a Group

Cut & Paste by 'Selected Level'
This is the easiest option and is fine if you haven't got any annotation

Select Individually
This is fine until you hit a certain point, where the original problem kicks in. One visual indicator is that providing the 'Pick New' button is still lit, you will be able to change the workplane. If you hit the limit, just use shift+click and remove the last beam selected

Hitch a Ride in a Group
You have a view with beams that are annotated with tags.
You want to amend the workplane of some of them, while still showing the beams and maintaining the tags in that view. Select the beams and the tags and group them together. This will create a model group with an attached detail group. Change the level of the group to the required level, then ungroup and delete the group from the project browser. The beams should now be at the amended level. The tags will show, providing the new level is within the view range of the view.

Wednesday, 1 February 2012

A problem that seems to come up sometimes is getting section marks to look consistent on a series of floor plans. For grids and levels, the 'Propagate Extents' function serves this purpose, but doesn't extend to section marks. In absence of this, I set out to discover the rules that dictate how section marks behave in relation to views

The Scenario

The plan on the right (Level 1) is the view in which the section mark was placed. Both views are set to an identical crop box. The extents are at the border between the pink and blue shading (more on this in a minute) As you can see, the marks display as required

Now in the plan on the left (Level 2), the view crop is adjusted. All four sides are within the shaded areas and the section mark remains unaffected

Moving one of the crop extents outside of this shaded area, the section mark revokes to its default initial view.

Conclusion

In short, there is a zone of 63.5mm (or 2.5" in old money), multiplied by the view scale. This is applicable inside and outside the crop extents. (shown here as pink and blue). It relates to the view where the section mark is placed and governs the display in other views. Should the original view crop extents change, this zone will amend with it. Providing all four extents in any other views are within this zone, the section mark will remain unaffectedIn standalone views (ie non-dependent), the best way to control this is through a scope box. In dependent views, it is best to place and adjust the section mark in the 'Child' view, rather than the 'Parent View'.